The organization of societal conflicts by pavement ants Tetramorium caespitum: an agent-based model of amine-mediated decision making
Authored by Kevin M Hoover, Andrew N Bubak, Isaac J Law, Jazmine D W Yaeger, Kenneth J Renner, John G Swallow, Michael J Greene
Date Published: 2016
DOI: 10.1093/cz/zow041
Sponsors:
United States National Science Foundation (NSF)
Platforms:
Python
Model Documentation:
ODD
Flow charts
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
Ant colonies self-organize to solve complex problems despite the
simplicity of an individual ant's brain. Pavement ant Tetramorium
caespitum colonies must solve the problem of defending the territory
that they patrol in search of energetically rich forage. When members of
2 colonies randomly interact at the territory boundary a decision to
fight occurs when: 1) there is a mismatch in nestmate recognition cues
and 2) each ant has a recent history of high interaction rates with
nestmate ants. Instead of fighting, some ants will decide to recruit
more workers from the nest to the fighting location, and in this way a
positive feedback mediates the development of colony wide wars. In ants, the monoamines serotonin (5-HT) and octopamine (OA) modulate many
behaviors associated with colony organization and in particular
behaviors associated with nestmate recognition and aggression. In this
article, we develop and explore an agent-based model that conceptualizes
how individual changes in brain concentrations of 5-HT and OA, paired
with a simple threshold-based decision rule, can lead to the development
of colony wide warfare. Model simulations do lead to the development of
warfare with 91\% of ants fighting at the end of 1 h. When conducting a
sensitivity analysis, we determined that uncertainty in monoamine
concentration signal decay influences the behavior of the model more
than uncertainty in the decision-making rule or density. We conclude
that pavement ant behavior is consistent with the detection of
interaction rate through a single timed interval rather than integration
of multiple interactions.
Tags
behavior
superorganism
System
Protocol
Brain
Temnothorax-albipennis
Formica-japonica
Octopamine
Dopamine